On additive spanners in weighted graphs with local error

TL;DR

This paper introduces new weighted additive spanners with local error bounds, improving sparsity and lightness guarantees over previous global-error constructions, applicable to pairwise and all-pairs distances.

Contribution

It presents the first weighted additive spanners with local error bounds, achieving improved sparsity and lightness guarantees in weighted graphs.

Findings

Pairwise +$(2+\varepsilon)W$ and +$(6+\varepsilon)W$ spanners with $O(n|\mathcal{P}|^{1/3})$ and $O(n|\mathcal{P}|^{1/4})$ edges.

All-pairs +$4W$ spanner with $\tilde{O}(n^{7/5})$ edges.

Lightness guarantees: $O(n)$ for +$\varepsilon W$ and $O(n^{2/3})$ for +$(4+\varepsilon)W$ spanners.

Abstract

An \emph{additive $+\beta$ spanner} of a graph $G$ is a subgraph which preserves distances up to an additive $+\beta$ error. Additive spanners are well-studied in unweighted graphs but have only recently received attention in weighted graphs [Elkin et al.\ 2019 and 2020, Ahmed et al.\ 2020]. This paper makes two new contributions to the theory of weighted additive spanners. For weighted graphs, [Ahmed et al.\ 2020] provided constructions of sparse spanners with \emph{global} error $\beta = cW$, where $W$ is the maximum edge weight in $G$ and $c$ is constant. We improve these to \emph{local} error by giving spanners with additive error $+cW(s,t)$ for each vertex pair $(s,t)$, where $W(s, t)$ is the maximum edge weight along the shortest $s$--$t$ path in $G$. These include pairwise $+(2+\eps)W(\cdot,\cdot)$ and $+(6+\eps) W(\cdot, \cdot)$ spanners over vertex pairs $\Pc \subseteq V \times V$ on $O_{\eps}(n|\Pc|^{1/3})$ and $O_{\eps}(n|\Pc|^{1/4})$ edges for all $\eps > 0$, which extend previously known unweighted results up to $\eps$ dependence, as well as an all-pairs $+4W(\cdot,\cdot)$ spanner on $\widetilde{O}(n^{7/5})$ edges. Besides sparsity, another natural way to measure the quality of a spanner in weighted graphs is by its \emph{lightness}, defined as the total edge weight of the spanner divided by the weight of an MST of $G$. We provide a $+\eps W(\cdot,\cdot)$ spanner with $O_{\eps}(n)$ lightness, and a $+(4+\eps) W(\cdot,\cdot)$ spanner with $O_{\eps}(n^{2/3})$ lightness. These are the first known additive spanners with nontrivial lightness guarantees. All of the above spanners can be constructed in polynomial time.